


satellites, once

by Lance_Otter



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters: Ruby & Sapphire & Emerald | Pokemon Ruby Sapphire Emerald Versions
Genre: Angst, Codependency, Fanon, Gen, pre-game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-19
Updated: 2020-05-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:54:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24266986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lance_Otter/pseuds/Lance_Otter
Summary: the sun and moon can't rise together.(the four times Liza wasn't mad at her brother and the one time that she was.)
Relationships: Fu | Tate & Lan | Liza, Mikuri | Wallace/Tsuwabuki Daigo | Steven Stone (Implied)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 22





	satellites, once

The sun and moon can’t rise together.

\---  
The four times Liza wasn’t mad at her brother, and the one time that she was.

  
i. 

Mossdeep is a quiet place.

A cage upon a solemn sea, woken to stir at approximately eleven o’clock each morning from the announcement in the neighbouring space station. She sleeps in a shadow of her brother, twin limbs tangled even from the expanse of a bunk bed; not in matters of physicality, but in matters of the knowing - that moment when her eye cracks open and a groan spills from his lips to mark their waking. 

Dad’s not home again today, leaves his twins behind as he heads off to work and Liza pulls on socks to a silent house. Watches from the corner of her eye as Tate does the same; faultless, faultless mirrors of each other, where she pulls on her left sock and he tugs on his right, seated at the steps that lead up from the front yard and into the quiet quarters.

She takes a moment to watch the indication of rock that mark theirs as being almost a fairy tales estate; a smattering of stepping stones leading to a small cottage just bordering the sea - a bathroom with a laundry basket inside, a kitchen with windows that opened to the sun, a barely-touched living room, and a pair of bedrooms; one for her and Tate, one for dad and the ghost of their mother who had been there, once upon a time.

Breakfast is leftovers again. An apologetic sign left atop the rice cooker, _I didn’t want to wake you :(_ , and like clockwork the twins set about their morning, with Tate reaching for a pair of porcelain bowls, Liza reaching for the spoon to scrape rice into each of them, but -

Something is out of place, this morning. 

The earth rumbles in a tune the girl is equal parts familiar to and impartial to; the latest of Devoncorp’s studies into the stars, but something is out of place in spite of the awareness - and she doesn’t quite react in time when Tate stumbles on his feet. 

Swerves, watches, and in a moment where unity is absent, the bowl topples from his fingers and shatters on her foot. She hisses, he jerks, and as the pieces lay where they fall with Tate hurriedly telling her to _stand still, I’ll clean it up_ , and the two clean up together irregardless, she fears it more than she’s mad by the pain. That moment of wrongness, of stilted, uncomfortable wrongness, where the two are not twin halves but separate errors on behalf of a reality that had not yet been able to line them up together.

Blood drips down between her toes, beginning in the base of her foot, and it stings when he pours cleaning alcohol on it, applies the bandaid with a huff and a snide comment.

There are now five bowls in the cupboard instead of their six. 

That should have been her first warning that something has changed today. 

* * *

ii. 

They bury their father two days later. 

Liza loses herself amidst the haze of it all, of opening the door to the Gym and seeing Mr Stone inside, cheerful face grim and gaunt and a certain flicker of something that she does not catch but her psionic energies do; it’s the face that Tate makes when he has done something wrong and won’t confess, of curled lip and tense shoulders, but where Tate always looks away, the Champion does not.

(She feels bad for him, sometimes, knows there must be some bubbling pit of acrid lava underneath the surface. Disturbed by each movement of tectonic plate and each tilt on the world’s axis. It is the foundation that breaks under pressure.)

It’s Tate who breaks when he informs them, in gentle, barely-there words that Dad won’t be coming home, something of misplaced wiring and unplaced metal, of smoke filtering in through the thin bars of the shuttle that was meant to launch but never did, and it’s Tate who breaks and _screams_ , shrieks absurdity and that’s not true, and ‘ _he’ll be back any minute,’_ and it’s Liza who stands there and stares.

(She almost wants to tell him to shut up, to quiet, for each word from his lips is just another moment of silence from the Champion and she’s always been the one to pull back, to know when others were hurting as a result of her brother’s sharpness, she should tell him to ease, to calm, for there’s no mess if they sort it together, but that isn’t how it goes. She doesn’t say anything.)

(She doesn’t say anything.)

(It’s Wattson, in the end, Wattson who pulls at Tate’s collar in Liza’s absence, pulls him away from where he lashes out in screams and snarls, Wattson who’s eyes crease unhappily at the corners, and when Wattson tells her to follow, she doesn’t answer. She doesn’t say anything, she just stares ahead, thinks of the note that Dad left each morning when work called, thinks of them folded and neatly discarded.)

(She’s not mad at Tate, then, not even for the embarrassment.)

_I didn’t want to wake you_

Wattson calls her, again, and she goes. Stumbling on her own feet as if the cut had run deeper and infected them to be the same, fragile porcelain underneath, white and cracked and coloured in soft blue vines that coiled around the edges, and Tate looks at her as if asking her to argue on their behalf, and Liza doesn’t say anything.

The salt air stings at her lips, and she reaches a hand out to take his, and he pulls away the first time in an instinctive recoil, and she can’t hate him for it. No, she doesn’t hate him for it, for when she tries again and brushes fingertips over fingertip, he laces their hands together.

Dad had tried to coax them into going to school, once. They hadn’t focused, hadn’t learned, hadn’t done anything; they had taken desks next to each other, and played games of shadows in the courtyard and lunchtime, and when called upon, answered in unison.

Only once. 

(Even when dad was around, it was only ever really the two of them, she thinks, but she knows that’s not what Tate thinks and so she keeps quiet.)

* * *

iii. 

It’s Liza, in the end, who watches the proceedings. 

A much-too-bright sun fills the sky, paints all the world in brilliant shades of blue and soft white from the clouds, and the collar of her shirt is too tight, too tight and stifling and wrong. Dad had friends. People still in Devon Corp attire and black suits, eyes creased as they come over to her, over and over. Roxanne steps in after the fifth one, stands at her side and tells them that she doesn’t want to speak to them - doesn’t want their condolences or murmurs that he was a good man.

“Normally, they’d allow for an open-casket,” Brawly hums, absent-mindedly, and as Roxanne kicks him in the shins, Liza stifles a laugh that she doesn’t understand the source of. “What?”

“You know perfectly well ‘what’,” is Roxanne’s icy reply, and the look she gives to Liza is strange and subdued; a stifled anxiety and grief behind them. “Have you had something to eat? You-” 

- _seem rather pale_ , are the words on the back of her mind, and Liza doesn’t know how to respond to that. “I’m fine,” she chirps, forces saccharine cheer into her words because she’s one of the youngest Gym Leaders in Hoenn and more than _anything_ , she’d wanted the other Gym Leaders to respect her and acknowledge her and- “I’m just a little tired, is all!”

Tate isn’t here.

(She doesn’t resent him for it, but one of them needed to be here, in case Dad started tapping at the lid and it turned out to be an error and she didn’t want him to wake up without someone here - without one of his kids here to remind him that he needs to stay alive. To tell him that he has a family to stay with here, to stay here.)

“What happens to us now?” She asks, finally, as the sun reaches a midday point and the crowd begins to disperse under the wrath of Hoenn’s warmth. She doesn’t mean to say it, but like an ekans it twists from her lips and shades the funeral in colours that she’s never wanted to paint in. Denial, perhaps, for something she has never considered nor wanted to consider. “...will we be okay?”

“Of course you will,” Roxanne replies, instantly, “I’m certain that everything will turn out for the best, even if it does not feel like that currently.”

She didn’t answer the question.

She stays by dad’s side during the wake, stares at the white sheet of cloth that covers him like the thin blankets when the nights became frigid from the sea that rolled him, considers that perhaps there’s movement underneath. A finger twitching, an eye shifting below the lid, the occasional flinch of a heartbeat.

If no one is there, then the wicked spirits will carry him off; feast off of his bones and deny him the chance at rebirth, and so, she keeps vigil. Gets to her feet once the candles begin to die, and restores flame to their wicks. Burns her fingertips on the matches they gave her, and as she blows on red skin, she thinks she hears a howling wind speak in his voice.

It sounds a bit like Tate, she thinks, and perhaps that is a bad omen in and of itself, and she realises that she is, for once, alone.

* * *

iv. 

“Do you want something to eat?” Wattson asks, and she looks up from where Tate stares blankly down at the wooden table, having gnawed red lines into his lips ‘til even now she sees a faint trickle to mark him alive rather than the motionless marionette he feigns being.

“No, thank you,” simultaneous and echoing, her brother’s words on her lips and hers filling the lungs of him in turn. Less psychic, more machinery, twin gears falling back into effortless unison, moving only when pulled close together - spinning pointlessly in absence. 

His house is modern. Furnished and sleek, nothing like the creaking boards of home. Nothing like Liza expected, truthfully, curling in on herself from the dining table chair and feeling her leg move as if to pull it up, for her to bury herself in the shape. 

Her home is a quieter place in spite - or perhaps because of - overlying machinery; a meticulous detachment from the neighbouring space stations, a solitary shrine to sleeping Gods rather than the rockets that carry to the Heavens. Wattson’s home reeks of electricity - maybe it’s in him, the sparks that line his very soul; _inclination_ , someone had told her once. Inclination in the way that Roxanne is unyielding as brickwork and Flannery’s fuse is hotter than coals and Wallace as tempestuous as a raging sea. 

Once upon a time, humans and Pokemon were the same. And on some levels, they still are. Still fight because they want to, still eat when they are hungry, still in possession of the traits that mark them as beasts. The only real difference is the language.

This isn’t home. 

(But Tate’s here, Tate’s here, with her, and she’s home, she’s home, she’s home-)

She doesn’t feel at home, here, even though her other half is here, even though her Lunatone is here, and she’s not the fool who’ll claim that it’s the lightning that runs inside the walls that puts her at unease.

Tate catches it, curls fingers around the wooden table and spits across, snarls in that sharp, short-tempered tone of his, “I want to go home.”

It’s not Wattson’s fault. 

But she isn’t mad at her brother - not for speaking the truth. Absent of the drive that directs their Gym Battles and lacking in the counterweight of dad’s affability, the scales tip out of balance; he speaks over her, cuts her off, cuts off the growing sapling of her voice and lets it fall back into the dirt as he shrieks obscenities. 

Wattson simply sighs, bows his head and seems less a cheery thunder sprite and more a wizened statue, chipped and cracked and forgotten by time. Like Rayquaza watching the world self-destruct, with tired, slitted eyes. She wonders if the Gods pity them. Pity the madness that they cloak themselves in, pity this dance of famine and foolishness that they twirl themselves into, pity the way that she is little more than an orbiting moon that spirals in the sunlight of her sibling. Close, so close, but much too far.

She looks down at her hands, looks down at bitten nails that redden at the corners, the slightest hint of a once-hangnail, and she doesn’t blame her brother. 

She doesn’t blame him at all.

* * *

v. 

“I’m leaving,” he says. 

Liza doesn’t look up from her bowl, finds pieces of herself inside the scattered grains of rice and untouched slices of ginger. An off-white and an off-yellow dance, a sicknesses colour, like plague painting the body in paler and paler shades.

She wonders if it is her heart that lies buried beneath Tate’s ribcage, if he had seized it while they were in the womb and held it close to himself; perhaps that would explain the hole and the ache that fills it. Perhaps that would explain that he is always the one to be _more_ of them - perhaps it justifies how he pushes two feet forward, one after the other, and she is left behind.

“I’m leaving.”

A moment. He opens his mouth again, she can catch the movement from the corner of her peripheral. 

“You can’t,” she whispers, finally.

The fuel upon his fire, the kindling needed to set the sparks to bonfire, and his eyes flash sulphur. “We can’t grow stronger together,” and does he hear the knives in his voice? Can he put a finger to the blade and feel how sharp it is, or is it simply something that evades him, so high up in his clouds that he may be mistaken for the sun itself? “If we’re to be the best Gym Leaders in Hoenn, we have to get stronger, and we can’t do that if we’re always attached at the hip.”

(She’s always been good at this game of doppelganger that they play.)

“When was it about becoming _stronger?_ ” She spits back. “Aren’t we strong enough? Why do we have to compare ourselves to them?”

(We’re children, is what she means, we’re young, we’re free, shouldn’t we take that chance and set sail?)

(But she is only free with him, and he is only free without her.)

_(Wallace’s tone, the lilting behind the smoke that she can always smell on him, the blankness to his eyes as he stares over the harbour, paper in one hand and all his guilt inside a ring upon the other, “relationships, like all things, are compromise.”)_

(compromise, but she’s tired, she’s tired, she’s _tired_ -)

“What’s the point of being Gym Leaders if we’re not going to be striving for anything?!” Doesn’t he hear it? Doesn’t he hear the hollowness in her spirit, that she cannot match his pace any longer? Doesn’t he realise that she is less a sister and more an echo of it? Doesn’t he hear her anymore? “Dad would have wanted-”

“You have no idea _what_ dad wanted!” 

And the slamming of her hands on the table upturns the bowl resting there, sends scraps of undesired food and feelings across the floor as it cracks on impact. 

“Do you have any idea how self-obsessed you are? Because, and guess what, Tate, while you were off deciding to be ‘stronger’ and ‘independant’, and- and- whatever it is that you want to be without me, I had to _bury him_! I needed you, and you weren’t _there_ , so don’t tell me what he would have wanted when you have no thoughts on what _I_ wanted!”

His face creases, “that’s not-”

Her throat pricks at her skin, can taste sand and salt and the shimmer of anger that floats down her cheeks; not in the serene domesticity of actors who’ve learned to cry in a way that marks them beautiful, but in the bitter, biting snarl of a beast that knows he is dying. He flinches back. There must be a split somewhere. An uneven separation, for he is meant to be the one who steps forward-

-and she’s left behind, she’s left behind, she’s always, _always left behind_ -

“I had to pick out what clothes he was going to be laid to rest in. I had to keep watch so that he could make his way to the afterlife. I was the one who had to listen to everyone as they talked about how _good_ he was, and how _strong_ he was, and how _noble_ of a man he was, and you weren’t _there_ , Tate.”

She chokes.

“I needed you with me,” she hisses, “and you. Weren’t. There.”

The silence that follows kills her, on the inside. Broken like porcelain; not in the clean, even slices, but in the pieces that fall off and trap in the undersides of feet weeks, weeks later. Beneath the room’s guillotine, the shared face, shared eyes, shared fragility seems a curse.

“Fine. Fine,” she says, “go. You always do.”

He slips from her grip. Pulls at the sutures that bind them and breaks the thread so that he may be free of her. Free like dad from the living. Free like the living from the dead, in turn, opposite in all things; a burning sun in a blue sky, a cold earth that froze the feet that walked it. Passive and progressive. Where she wants him near her, he wants her _gone_.

A click, as the door closes. Her hands curl in the fabric of her pants, tighten around the cotton. When she collapses to her knees, her shriek is like that of machinery, creaking to a grinding halt. 

She hates him, at this moment.

She hates him more than anything.

(But at the same time, she doesn’t.)


End file.
